By Mark Ballard for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
In August 2005, the Office of Government Commerce (OGC), the
government's procurement sheriff, conceded to industry pressure and
agreed to review the new model contract terms it introduced against
industry advice in November 2004.
The pilot of the new model terms was going to be the retendering
of £1bn worth of contracts by the Department of Constitutional
Affairs (DCA), a project called DISC.
However, in a written statement to The Register,
the OGC said it needed to review other projects before it could be
sure of its conclusions.
"Learning will be captured from a range of programmes and
projects making use of the model contract framework," it said.
"It would be inappropriate to overly depend on the experience of
any one project, such as DISC, especially when implementation is
still at such an early stage," it added.
The DCA told The Register repeatedly last year that
it was unable to discuss any lessons it had learned from using the
new model contract terms until the contracts had been let. This was
done in November after a delay of about six months.
"The DCA has co-operated by sharing with the OGC its experience
of using the model contracts as part of the model's continuing
development," it said in November.
The OGC said it couldn't reveal the substance of its contractual
review - it would have to leave that to the DCA. But the DCA was
not forthcoming.
"The DISC contracts were largely based on the OGC model
contracts and modified only to take into account the specific needs
of the DISC programme."
What we don't yet know is what this all means for the £12bn of
procurement managed annually by the public sector. That is, whether
the new model contract terms the industry has opposed actually give
the government better value for money on IT contracts.
"We will make decisions on any changes to the current version,
at the end of the process in the summer," the OGC said in a
statement.
© The Register
2007
